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| Gemma Arterton as Alice Archer with James Norton as Robert Freegard in Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson’s high-stakes and sly spy thriller Rogue Agent Photo: Nick Briggs, IFC Films |
A female voiceover conveys the tricks of the trade in Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson’s high-stakes and sly spy thriller Rogue Agent (co-written with Michael Bronner who wrote the original unpublished article on the case) and shot by Larry Smith. We are informed that for an instant connection we should look into a stranger’s eyes exactly long enough to register their colour. Good spies hide in plain sight. Most effectively, they find out which story the other person is dying to be told.
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| Adam Patterson with Declan Lawn and Anne-Katrin Titze on James Norton’s specialty dish: “The bolognese came at the script stage and then it won well because James in real life is a great eater.” |
Rogue Agent begins with Robert Freegard (James Norton) working as a bartender in a local pub where he recruits three students from a small-town agricultural college, Sophie (Marisa Abela), Mae (Freya Mavor), and Ian (Rob Malone) as freelance agents. The year is 1993, the IRA bombings flood the news and we learn that MI5 is looking to hire people to inform on those suspected of plotting terrorist activities. The story soon jumps ahead nine years to Alice Archer (Gemma Arterton), a successful solicitor in London and her encounter with Freegard, now working as a salesman of luxury cars.
Based on actual events, what follows is a riveting game of espionage and craftiness, manipulation and ruthlessness, deception and hocus-pocus, ghosts, heroism, and perfidy. There is “mad, sad, and bad” says Alice’s detective acquaintance Phil (Julian Barratt). Bad stands for a sociopath who will never ever stop, a bit like Longplayer, the Tibetan music bowls, conceived and composed by Jem Finer at the Lighthouse in Trinity Buoy Wharf, London, commissioned by Artangel that will keep playing until exactly one thousand years have passed (from just before midnight on the 31st of December 1999 until the last moment of 2999).
From the North Coast of Ireland Declan Lawn and from Belfast Adam Patterson joined me on Zoom for an in-depth conversation on Rogue Agent.
Anne-Katrin Titze: Hi, where are you?
Adam Patterson: I am in Belfast.
Declan Lawn: I’m up on the North Coast of Ireland right now, beside the beach.
AKT: I am in New York in the heatwave [alas with my bag packed for an extended beach weekend right behind me].
DL: Oh dear!
AP: It’s also very hot here for Belfast. Hence my crimson face.
AKT: Zoom is mixing its own colours anyway. First of all, congratulations on a very impressive film. The architecture of the storytelling I liked very much, especially how you begin. You have the female voiceover narration, you give us spy tricks and slowly it unfolds. Tell me about the structuring!
DL: [Robert] Freegard is the master illusionist and we wanted the film to also play a little confidence trick on an audience if possible. We wanted the film to work even if you were coming to it totally blind that you would be as seduced by him [James Norton as Freegard] as Alice [Gemma Arterton] is. And even if you knew before the film that he was a conman, that he would be so charming, persuasive and seductive that there’d be a little part of you also understanding how she falls for him.
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| Declan Lawn on James Norton as Robert Freegard: “We wanted the film to work even if you were coming to it totally blind that you would be as seduced by him as Alice is.” Photo: Nick Briggs, IFC Films |
We very deliberately structured it that the first half of the film would be essentially like a love affair and that almost at exactly the midpoint of the film we know for certain - both Alice and the audience know for certain - that he is telling lies and that it’s all illusion. Then the second half is a slightly different film, a kind of psychologically thrilling cat and mouse. That was all done very deliberately. It was done to play a little structural trick on the audience.
AP: We also felt the best way to kind of represent it - there’s so much depth and scope to the story. It starts ten years ago and then catches up. So we felt the way was to understand how each one of those victims was seduced. Originally they all want to be spies with MI5, so it’s a spy story. Then he meets the litigation lawyer [Alice Archer], whom he offers the chance to escape the entrapments of the male-driven legal world and become her own boss and it becomes a romantic story.
Then when the evidence becomes too much, when she goes to visit Sophie’s [Marisa Abela] parents [Simon Chandler and Melissa Collier] and the hammer really comes down, it then becomes a revenge story. And can she pick herself up from the canvas? Can she bring him down? Yes, there is a blending of genre, but we felt an honest depiction of the sheer scale of his crimes in the story.
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| Declan Lawn on Robert Freegard (James Norton) with Anne Archer (Gemma Arterton): “That he would be so charming, persuasive and seductive that there’d be a little part of you also understanding how she falls for him.” Photo: Nick Briggs, IFC Films |
AKT: As you say, everyone has a story they want to be told. We all do. So you give us that and show precisely that with the film. For different people there are different stories and when you have that skill he does, you provide them. A word about the names. He keeps his real name, whereas I think all the other characters’ names are invented. The name Alice Archer is so Henry James! I thought of Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady and Alice, well she enters this topsy-turvy world.
DL: It was exactly that! Alice because she went through the looking glass, and Archer because she becomes a huntress in the second half of the film. It’s exactly as you’ve said, all of the characters are obviously inspired by real people. A lot of the journalism and the initial work was done by Michael [Bronner].
But we felt because we were consolidating the story and also leaving a lot of victims out because we had to, we should do these people the service of changing their names. So that we were not saying this is literally exactly what happened, but emotionally and psychologically it’s the truth of what happened. We just felt as former journalists that it was the right thing.
AP: To tell this story in two hours we had to leave a lot of truth out but felt we’ve attained the essence of the truth in the film. That’s what you’re always fighting for when you’ve got way too much story and you’re trying to helm it into two hours of a dramatic structure.
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| Anne Archer (Gemma Arterton) driving to the lighthouse and listening with Robert Freegard (James Norton) to Just Like Heaven by The Cure Photo: Nick Briggs, IFC Films |
DL: We have Michael as the guardian and the gatekeeper of the real story. He did the original article and script and he was in touch with the real people. So we had a constant back and forth negotiation with him about how we would hone it and when it would turn into drama. That tripartite relationship worked very well because we’re all former journalists, we’ve all come from the same background. It wasn’t a painful process, it was quite a productive one.
AKT: The breadcrumbs you have sprinkled throughout - I’m thinking of the spaghetti bolognese, the lighthouses, the fact that he doesn’t drink - are those fact or fiction?
AP: Freegard is a creature of repetition, because when he finds something that works he repeats it. If you’re a magician and there’s a trick that works you continue to use the same trick. That’s why there’s always the bolognese. He’s learned to make one dish in his life and that’s the one that he woos people with.
He does have a genuine and in real life fascination with lighthouses. Also the lighthouse as a symbol of escape and freedom. And that’s why it ties into this world that he tries to sell Alice. He brings her to the edge of the world and says: “Look out there, this could all be yours.”
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| Anne Archer (Gemma Arterton) and Robert Freegard (James Norton) arrive at the lighthouse Photo: Nick Briggs, IFC Films |
The bolognese came at the script stage and then it won well because James [Norton] in real life is a great eater. It comes well, he’s a man, he just enjoys his food. And it just came out really strong in the film, didn’t it?
DL: Yeah, that’s right. And we made the decision early on to have quite a lot of eating and drinking and even smoking in the film because it happens at a highpoint of consumerism in the early noughties [aughts] in London. Adam and I both vaguely remember. It’s when before the economic crash everyone is hyper-consuming everything and each other. And Alice is caught in that trap and it’s giving her no satisfaction.
And Freegard in a strange way offers her freedom from the rat race and says basically she’s caught in the world of infinite choice and he offers her one great choice. All of those breadcrumbs that you refer to came from the original research, reading about the real case, and doing what I guess directors do, which is to pick out little visual story elements that we think serve as signals for the wider story.
AKT: Talking of visuals, you have Larry Smith, a wonderful cinematographer, of Kubrick crew fame. The choice of visuals tells us indeed so much. I am thinking for instance of the leopard painting that is so ugly, that he brings as a gift for Alice. Immediately you have the suspicion, that this is so terribly wrong.
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| Robert Freegard (James Norton) with Sophie (Marisa Abela), one of his MI5 recruits Photo: Nick Briggs, IFC Films |
AP: So weird, yeah.
AKT: And I also want to ask you about the aural side, the Tibetan music bowls and the thousand-year installation at the lighthouse. Is it part of the actual story or your metaphor for the “mad, sad, bad” where the bad never ends?
DL: I’ll tell you a little bit about that and I’m sure Adam would like to speak about working with Larry, which was a wonderful experience. We were aware of the existence of Longplayer on the Tibetan music bowls and the composition that lasts for a thousand years. Just like in anything that you write you use things that you’re vaguely aware of. Almost subconsciously you think could we use that? And we did.
There’s a lighthouse there and we thought that’s a really good metaphor for a kind of narcissistic illusionist who can’t stop. The music never stops and he can’t stop and it just goes on forever. It’s a real thing we incorporated, you can just go and visit. There’s a happy serendipity sometimes in writing, where you just utilise stuff you know about to serve your film. Your question about Larry is a great one and Adam worked so closely with him on this.
AP: I mean, listen, it’s our first feature film and we were completely blessed to be working with a master tactician in Larry Smith. He’s the perfect man for this film because it needed to be helmed in the world of realism and Larry lights almost exclusively with practical lighting. You see it in a lot of his films, like Eyes Wide Shut.
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| Anne Archer (Gemma Arterton) with Sophie’s parents (Melissa Collier and Simon Chandler) Photo: Nick Briggs, IFC Films |
We were going to dress a room and the room would feel real and there’d be pockets of light everywhere. And we could then just go in and shoot 360. It allowed us to shoot at the speed and also as importantly to be able to deliver a tonality that was real and in keeping with the real story. This really happened and we couldn’t go for a hyperised visual world. It had to be believable and Larry is just a master at lighting like that. Absolute pleasure to work with that man.
AKT: One moment I particularly loved is the hug. I think you know what I’m talking about.
AP: The Judas kiss?
AKT: Exactly. When you know that he knows that she knows and she knows that he knows. We watch it and they are both pretending that the other doesn’t know what they know. It’s a fantastic moment.
DL: Thank you. It’s written in the script, as Adam says, as a reciprocal Judas kiss and we knew when we were writing it that it would be a strong moment and James and Gemma didn’t disappoint in how they delivered it. After that the whole film changes.
After that all of the illusion is stripped away. There’s no longer any kind of one-upmanship. He is unequivocally a conman and she is unequivocally trying to get back at him. I’m glad that you said that because I really love that moment too. It’s a joy to have two really good actors doing it.
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| Anne-Katrin Titze's vegan bolognese Photo: Ed Bahlman |
AP: It’s a difficult one to pull off. In the previous scene she meets the parents of Sophie and as Declan says, the hammer comes down and you realise, oh my god, all of her suspicions were correct. Then it’s a big decision for her. She makes a decision then to try to face up to him by going into the hug and basically saying I’m going to try and see you close. Which is a very bold and strong decision for someone to do.
She’s offering more vulnerability then, so then when he leaves again with all her money, the devastation is all that much more and she really is knocked for six and then obviously she has to rise up again. It creates a beautiful narrative for her character. Certainly that moment is a very nice one.
AKT: You were talking about the timing of it all. The film begins in 1993, then moves to 2002 approximately. And yet the idea of the manipulation is just so much of the now, that the film is coming out now. It’s frightfully of the present, I think.
AP: Here is the thing, right? These people exist in the world and the people that they manipulate are strong, intelligent, confident people. They’re not foolish, they just happen to fall into the company of someone who is a master of manipulation. We had a tagline for this film - you already brought up the one part of it. It’s everyone has got a story they want to be told, but if it’s told by the wrong person at the right time it can be the most damaging thing in the world, right? Everyone of us has a vulnerable spot. And these people can see that.
It happened to me in my life. I’ve met someone, I dated a girl and her whole life is a lie. I was an investigative journalist at the time. I was the last person who saw it coming. She fooled all of my friends, including Declan as well. It was horrendous, it tore my life apart for two years. So weirdly that experience helped me and Declan to say this isn’t the case of one guy who’s brilliant and lots of idiots. It’s a case of a brilliant manipulator and any of us can be taken over by him. This could happen to anyone.
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| Robert Freegard (James Norton) and Anne Archer (Gemma Arterton) at the top of the lighthouse Photo: Nick Briggs, IFC Films |
DL: Adam’s experience is why we wanted to do this project. As soon as he read the story, he felt very very connected to it and through him so did I. It was our main reason to want to delve into this. I think as filmmakers if you’re not interested then you shouldn’t be doing it and we were really interested. But you’re right in terms of its contemporary relevance. Terms like gaslighting and coercive control weren’t in the popular lexicon in the early noughties. They are now. But it has always happened, it’s happened forever, we’re just more aware of it now.
AKT: Thank you very much for the film and for this conversation.
AP: Thank you so much for your words.
DL: Thank you, this was really one of the most interesting conversations we’ve ever had about this film. So thank you so much. Maybe we’ll see you in New York some time!
Read what James Norton had to say on costumes, dancing, looking in the mirror, and Rogue Agent.
Rogue Agent opened in cinemas and became available on AMC+ in the US on August 12 and is currently on Netflix in the UK.
